Mark Twain

Author Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who wrote under the name of Mark Twain (1835 - 1910).

What a shame that the report of his death wasn’t an exaggeration! (Then again, we’d be surprised otherwise, he’d be like 175 years old.) The quintessential American writer and humorist would’ve been a natural for the Twittersphere. Twain’s witticisms practically beg for a 140-character treatment: a daily dose of thoughts like “All generalizations are false, including this one” would rack up followers as quickly as Tom Sawyer recruited fence whitewashers.